Responsive Design

Super Forum Spotlight: Bringing Your Thrive Site to Life with Widgets, CSS & More

At this year’s Higher Logic Super Forum, I had the opportunity to co-present with Justin Prevatte from Themelogic a hands-on Learning Lab session focused on unlocking the full visual and functional potential of Thrive community sites. The session, titled “Site Design: Widgets, CSS, and More,” was designed to give attendees actionable tips, customizable code snippets, and real-world examples to elevate their site design—no developer required!

🌟 Key Takeaways from the Lab

1. Optimize Your Home Pages (Public + Member):
We explored ways to simplify navigation, update profile widgets, increase logo size, and even add background images to make member home pages more dynamic and visually engaging.

2. Featured vs. HTML Cards – Choosing the Right Tool:
Not all cards are created equal! We compared HL Featured Cards and HTML Cards, diving into:

  • Accessibility and alt tags
  • Styling flexibility
  • Hover effects and interactivity
  • When to go no-code vs. when to embrace the techy side

We even shared live examples from Theme Logic and broke down what makes each card type shine.

3. Quick CSS Wins for Instant Impact:
Attendees learned how to:

  • Change the profile box background color
  • Customize calendar date stamps
  • Resize featured images for better visual pop

All with copy/paste-ready snippets you can drop into your CSS override!

4. JavaScript Magic Tricks:
Yes, you can do more than you think with a JS widget in your footer:

  • Random background or logo generators
  • Custom dropdown menus
  • Dynamic login button text
  • Easter eggs like “Dance Party” links 💃

5. Make Communities & Blogs Work for You:
We talked about combining community lists, filtering by type, and making the blog list widget more dynamic—while acknowledging where HL’s current tools still need a boost (yes, we’re still waiting on native blog images!).

💡 Final Thoughts

Designing your Higher Logic Thrive site doesn’t have to feel limiting. With a few key widgets, some CSS creativity, and a sprinkle of JavaScript, you can create a site that not only looks great but actively drives member engagement.

Missed the session or want a copy of the code examples? Feel free to reach out to me or explore themelogic.com for inspiration and implementation guides.

Stay creative,
Brett Wangman
President, The Center for Association Growth

I have worked with Brett Wangman for over 10 years now. We were first introduced to him through Higher Logic after we had a very troublesome integration process with our previous consultant. Brett came in and helped us get things off the ground in an easy and practical way – helping us successfully navigate the perils of launching a new site while learning some key strategies to help us better work with our members.  After moving to a new association, one of my first calls was to Brett.  Now, after two site upgrades and other side projects, we still come back to Brett to support our efforts. His help has been invaluable to keep us moving forward. I highly recommend him for any of your association’s Higher Logic needs – he’s awesome!

Margaret Rehayem
Vice President
National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions

Eating our own (responsive) dog food

There is an old saying you hear when you work for a software company for awhile… “We should eat your own dog food”.  In other words, if you are expecting other folks to pay to use the software or website you are building, the best way to ensure you give those folks a quality product or service, is to use the software or website yourself.

Since we, TCAG, are seeing a real spike in demand from associations wanting to upgrade their association website to have a responsive design, we thought it would be a good idea for us to upgrade our own website with a responsive design.  So, what you are seeing now is the result of that effort.

Here are a few things we learned from the experience.

1) Responsive or not, building an interesting website is kinda hard.

Because at the end of the day, you have to have something compelling to say.  Sometimes, after a long day of working on client projects and deadlines, it is a little hard to ‘be interesting’.  So for this first version of the site, we are happy with the content, but you can expect a lot of tinkering and word-smithing in the weeks to come.

Customizr Showcase

We were able to see a wide variety of sites using the theme we liked before we decided to us it.

2) Don’t create a responsive design from scratch.
Jump start your project by finding an existing, bootstrap-enabled responsive theme.  Then customize that theme to produce your final website.  That is what we wound up doing for this site.  First we created a WordPress site on Bluehost.  Then we looked at a lot of free and/or low cost responsive themes for WordPress. We stumbled upon Customizr. It was already Twitter Bootstrap-enabled (preferably Bootstrap 3.0) and it had a large gallery of existing sites using the theme which made it very easy to see what was possible (and what to avoid). A couple clicks and the theme was installed on our WordPress site. Then the real work began. Tweaking the color scheme. Tweaking some of the CSS. Finding compelling images. Rethinking how to organize our content. And rewriting a lot of the content.

3) Don’t underestimate the complexity of rolling out a responsive design.

If you thought it was hard enough to make a good looking site for someone looking at it on a large computer monitor, get ready for the schizophrenia that comes with trying to make the same design look good across all devices.  While starting with a responsive theme will help a lot, there is still a fair amount of fine

TCAG Websites Responsive Design

Here is how the new TCAG website looks on different devices.

tuning to make any site look good across all device interfaces.  Don’t say you weren’t warned!

While we still have work to do before we are truly satisfied with our new site, I have to say that it has been a fantastic learning experience.  We look forward to applying our new found understanding into a high quality service we can provide our association clients.

Brett